Astrology Almanacs And The Early Modern English Calendar

Astrology, Almanacs, and the Early Modern English Calendar is a handbook designed to help modern readers unlock the vast cultural, religious, and scientific material contained in early modern calendars and almanacs. It outlines the basic cosmological, astrological, and medical theories that undergirded calendars, traces the medieval evolution of the calendar into its early modern format against the background of the English Reformation, and presents a history of the English almanac in the context of the rise of the printing industry in England. The book includes a primer on deciphering early modern printed almanacs, as well as an illustrated guide to the rich visual and verbal iconography of seasons, months, and days of the week, gathered from material culture, farming manuals, almanacs, and continental prints. As a practical guide to English calendars and the social, mathematical, and scientific practices that inform them, Astrology, Almanacs,and the Early Modern English Calendar is an indispensable tool for historians, cultural critics, and literary scholars working with the primary material of the period, especially those with interests in astrology, popular science, popular print, the book as material artifact, and the history of time-reckoning.

Waste Paper in Early Modern England argues that rhetorical commonplaces referring to waste paper are indicative of everyday, material experience - of an author's, reader's, housewife's, or city-dweller's immersion in an environment brimming with repurposed scraps and sheets.

Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays--plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars--in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.

Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Enlightenment argues for the centrality of magical practices and ideas throughout the long eighteenth century. Although the hunt for witches in Europe declined precipitously after 1650, and the intellectual justification for natural magic came under fire by 1700, belief in magic among the general population did not come to a sudden stop. The philosophes continued to take aim at magical practices, alongside religion, as examples of superstitions that an enlightened age needed to put behind them. In addition to a continuity of beliefs and practices, the eighteenth century also saw improvement and innovation in magical ideas, the understanding of ghosts, and attitudes toward witchcraft. The volume takes a broad geographical approach and includes essays focusing on Great Britain (England and Ireland), France, Germany, and Hungary. It also takes a wide approach to the subject and includes essays on astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, cunning folk, ghosts, treasure hunters, and purveyors of magic. With a broad chronological scope that ranges from the end of the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, this volume is useful for undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars, and those with a general interest in magic, witchcraft, and spirits in the Enlightenment.

Explores life-writing forms - almanacs, financial accounts, commonplace books and parish registers - which emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'— a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted. In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great - Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' — writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen — than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work? Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.

Apart from the Bible, almanacs were the most influential and widely dispersed for of literature in Tudor and Stuart England. At their zenith in the later seventeenth century, they sold at a rate of 400,000 copies a year. They were read by many people who read little else, and the works of Shakespeare and Jonson, among others, have numerous references to them. Professor Capp's fascinating book (Faber, 1979) is the first to study their history in depth. It is full of vivid detail, and shows clearly how relevant they were to almost every aspect of life, social, intellectual, religious, political. As well as being a powerful force in revolutionary times, they played a central part in spreading scientific progress and medical learning, and in the development of popular journalism and printing. Possessing some of the characteristics of both pocket encyclopaedia and sermon, they conveyed information and/or moral commentary on such diverse topics as attitudes to rich and poor, agriculture, gardening, weights and measures, food , drink, sex, sleep, dress, bodily cleanliness, games, fairs, holidays, the weather, the state of the roads, posts, freemasonry, omens, witchcraft, will-making and even the sale of wives - in addition to making dramatic astrological prophecies about the likelihood of plague, famine and war in the year ahead.

Early modern bodies, particularly menstruating and pregnant bodies, were not stable signifiers. Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France presents the first full-length discussion of menstruation and its uncertain connections with embodied sex, gender and reproduction in early modern France. Attitudes to menstruation are explored in three inter-linked arenas: medicine, moral theology and law across the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of diverse sources, including court records and private documents, the author uses case studies to explore the relationship between the exceptional corporeality of individuals and attempts to construct menstrual norms, reflecting on how early modern individuals, lay or otherwise, grappled with the enigma of menstruation. She analyzes how early modern men and women accounted for the function, recurrence and appearance of menstruation, from its role in maintaining health to the link between other physiological and bodily processes, including those found in both male and female bodies. She questions the assumption that menstruation was exclusively associated with women by the second half of the eighteenth century, arguing that whilst sex-related, menstruation was not sex-specific even at the turn of the nineteenth. Menstruation remains a contentious topic today. This book is not, therefore, simply a study of periods in early modern France, but is also of necessity an exploration about the nature and constitution of historical evidence, particularly bodily evidence and how historians use this evidence. It raises important questions about the concept of certainty and about the value of observation, testimony, expertise, the nature of language and the construction of bodily truths - about the body as witness and the body as evidence.